


Winterspell: A Junkenstein Carol

by TheBibleSalesman



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, Junkenstein's Revenge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28620297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBibleSalesman/pseuds/TheBibleSalesman
Summary: To find someone who has been left behind by everybody else, the monk and hero Akande Ogundimu enters the cursed Wilds.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 10





	1. The Round Table

_Breathe_ , Akande _._ Pick one of the trees and study its historied bark. Watch the rich brown scales of its lifetime flow upwards on a river of energy. Tiny leaves crack through the frost. His fists settle back at his sides. Not as cold here as he thought. This forest teeters on the verge of Spring.

_You came here for a reason._

He looks past the grove where he stands to the line of bitter colorless firs at the bottom of a hill. Shadows between evergrey needles smile toothily back at him.

He is…looking for someone. He remembers the mission is not a self-directive, but that is hardly unusual. He has always been generous to those who are useful to him. Use is the foundation of friendship _._ Someone who gives him the framework to practice his mind. Someone with a skillset not found anywhere else. Someone flooded by life’s greatest treasure— _experience_ —bought at its highest price. The rare desire to hunt and kill in pursuit of higher standards of living. That is a friend.

Who is he looking for?

A campfire crackles under an outcrop on the hill. Not the work of a hunter, who would be clever about keeping the fire to embers and protecting their catch from bandits. Akande hangs deliberately silent and solid in the giggling forest. He watches a thin finger of smoke probe from beneath the rock and stretch purple into the sky.

It is the sort of cluelessly bold fire someone who is lost might make.

While his bandaged sandals hike the hill’s mossy swamp green face, Akande allows himself to wonder at the blank portrait of his objective. The name. That’s all he wants. From a name he can build any story. Any reasoning.

No one is looking, so he wraps his arms around his torso and brushes away the snowflakes on his skin. His left hand rubs with a few strips of cloth around the fingers softening the touch. His right hand is swallowed by a gauntlet of carvings and sylvan metal. And he finds the gauntlet warmer, more comforting. He holds his own shoulder and looks up at the pulse of the fire.

These questions he’s asking himself are useless. He needs facts to act on. The story of this place from someone who has been here longer. A friend would do, in these circumstances. At least he’s not so ignorant as the sprites in the trees around him, the ones trying to scare him by coiling the branches wickedly. The fools, to not know his name. To not yet know that he is the one who shapes the world.

‘Round the campfire sits a ring of birch trees, like pale knights just settling to their war table. Swirling cankers bloat the trunks. Dark sap trails from knobbly slits cut across swells in the bark. Akande searches above for samaras and unwrapping green, but these trees are bare. The tips of radiating twigs in the canopy smoke as though freshly charred.

And at the roots, all around the fire, lie the bodies of rabbits. Jelly red, with tufts of fur and ears sticking off the fringes. A black cauldron containing a pink stew grinds over the flame, suspended on a network of broken branches and rocks. Further back, in the violet alcove formed from the outcrop, wildflowers push from fissures in the stone, outlining a motionless corpse with crossed legs and a hooded face.

Akande jams his feet into the cleaner spaces between the rabbits and bends forward to fit his tall frame beneath the outcrop. He balances his gauntlet on the smoke-dried rock. The stew under him smells of cooking kidneys and decaying leaves.

He clears his throat, holding the back of his hand against his nose.

A hiss flaps the fringes of the corpse’s hood. The head isn’t far from him, not when he’s bent down like he is. Chains rattle in the dark. The face he thought was beaten in or peeled off _opens_ before him in a purple forget-me-not of plump tentacles.

From the eyes of nine scattered wildflowers rise slit-pupiled orbs in amber frames. Two suggestions of covetous green open on that face, convincing as a party mask. Other eye-colored points of light surface across the creature’s body, reminding Akande of a meal of jellyfish he’d had on a dare when he was much younger.

However many eyes the creature truly has, none of them focus, not even on his silhouette across the fire. The floating serpentines search through the air for something that isn’t there.

A purple hand extends into the firelight, wrist weighed by a massive manacle. The creature picks up a ladle lying on the rock and sticks the scoop into the cauldron, creating a slow, near-perfect circle. The trail of broken iron hanging off the manacle sings against the pot metal. Akande lowers his gauntlet.

He finds the familiar in the stranger: a patterned dhoti worn under a cloak muddy from extensive travel. A classic mudra for concentration formed by his unoccupied hand. Airy trousers with fishscale patterns, woven for comfort even after hours in the same position.

The creature tugs a ribcage from an unzipped rabbit skin and adds it to the cauldron. In the act of reaching over the fire, his nine and counting eyes finally find Akande.

“Greetings.” He has a deep, reverberating voice that holds onto the hiss of the final letter. His tentacles curl up in a curtsy, bearing their green undersides and dripping a few lines of glowing ooze into the pot. His mudra transforms into a welcoming open palm, the green eyeball in the center of it pointing at Akande. His thin arm shudders from the weight of his broken chains. “Would you care for stew?”

Akande squats, resting a hand on his stomach. Golden firelight shares their faces with each other. The creature takes up the ladle’s splintered grip and stirs the broth invitingly. Chunks of meat rise to the surface like the backs of spotless koi.

“I don’t feel quite hungry yet.” Akande finds a dry spot beside the creature where he can take a seat. He smiles down at that moving, drooling face. “But I’ll feast on your name.”

The ladle stops. Another long wheeze pushes from the creature’s curtaining.

“I had nearly forgotten it.” There are nuances to his voice that remind Akande of his own youth—when every word rang of discovery.

“Tell me. I will remember it for you.”

“Zenyatta,” the young man blurts, rubbing at something under his beard of tentacles. His hand emerges with a slick of green slime.

Akande wonders at the structure of the name. He already knows what to ask next. But he also knows it’s not the name he seeks. His heart isn’t singing.

“And I am Akande Ogundimu. Are you one of the Shambali, then?”

“Not anymore.” Zenyatta rubs his slimy hand on the opposing manacle.

“But you are a seeker of truth. Imprisoned over knowledge.”

Zenyatta’s tentacles dove together.

“Yes.”

“Then in return for your hospitality, I will free you.” Akande holds out his hand. He is surprised by how fast Zenyatta makes contact, laying the back of an iron-coated wrist into his palm, which is the sort without an eye of its own.

“Will you break the curse upon the Wilds?”

“Is that where we are?” Akande drags Zenyatta’s hand towards his center of gravity so he can test the manacle between a couple fingers of the gauntlet. Zenyatta tips over from his seat as easily as a sapling. “I should have guessed. The curse I’ve already met—stealing what’s most precious to us, is it?”

The runes on the manacle glow when he squeezes, and the iron holds firm. Zenyatta stares past the fire.

“Genji’s blade cut the chains, but he could not destroy these circlets.”

“Genji?” Akande recognizes the name and the sudden thirst to squash a fly.

“My student. He believes the Witch hides a treasure here which could restore my knowledge.” Zenyatta’s hand spikes from Akande’s grip and reaches towards the sky, his eyes on the fractured chain weighing him down. His arm drops after a moment, and Akande catches it again. “When I tired, he built this fire for me.”

“You can tire? I figured that lugging these around has made you one of the world’s strongest men by now.” Akande moves his thumb across the lavender wear lines beneath the manacle. Zenyatta flinches. “Is the curse behind your transformation as well?”

It could just be the briny, sulfurous tinge of the alcove, but Akande has a lingering concern that if he stays in the forest too long he might shed the hair he has left and sprout gills. The energetic but initially silent flaps of Zenyatta’s tentacles offer no assurances. The younger monk cocks his head.

“How do you mean?”

“Uh…” Well it is only a wind in his gut anyway. “Was there an instigating event for this curse?”

“Oh yes. We defeated a doctor in Adlersbrunn who threatened the townsfolk in his quest for revenge.”

Akande’s smile starts to pain his face. He abandons it and lowers his eyes to the heart of the fire.

“So you were the ones making that big gate shake. The vibrations went down to the castle’s very foundations. Not that I am complaining. It was the first good distraction in a very long time.”

“Genji was so passionate about meeting Junkenstein and his allies in battle again.” Zenyatta resumes his turn in the story with practiced ease. His unheld hand rises, miming claws. Passion, Akande supposes. “When he took the Witch’s head, we thought that was the end. But it seems our desperate conflict did not lead us to victory.”

Akande turns Zenyatta’s hand between his fingers. His skin feels oddly like velvet, joints darkening with a kind of vestigial segmentation. The firm muscles in his forearm twitch under the slightest grip. Akande presses his bare fingers into the runes on the manacle. It’s not the work of the cobbler in Adlersbrunn, that’s for sure.

Zenyatta wraps his captured hand into a small and fragile fist. Akande meets his eyes—the ocelli on his face, that is. “Even were our memories to revisit us in sharpest clarity, we are the impressions we leave upon each other, and those are always changing.” The green glow brightens. “There is no way to go but forward.”

“Now I regret even more that I cannot free you.” But even as he says it, his smile is back. Zenyatta accordingly withdraws his arm. Akande does have another idea, but it would break bones along with the manacle’s etched metal. The pain would be worth it, but he has no intention to stay and mind the other monk while he writhes among his flowers.

He reaches under his sash into a cloth pouch. His hand comes out topped with two coconut-flaked pastries. “Let these suffice as my gratitude. I baked them myself.” And as he says it, Akande remembers why. He remembers why these shuku shuku are much bigger than usual, and why there are only two.

They are for sharing, and not with a mild-mannered squid in a forest. They are a welcome home.

But he can’t go back on his word twice, so he lets Zenyatta lift them away and massage the air over them with his tentacles.

“I smell the yolk in these as though it were freshly cracked,” Zenyatta drools gleefully. “Such things I cannot consume, but I am sure Genji will experience them.” His long fingers curl over the shuku shuku and he tucks them somewhere behind his person. Akande smirks and gestures at the blood-filled pot.

“And here I thought you broke with the Shambali over their silly vegetarianism.”

“After…after he built the fire…” Akande reads the skips in Zenyatta’s thoughts straight from his throat, but the younger monk struggles through. “Genji became hungry. He said only flesh would do. He was very insistent. Very loud. He said ‘if you do not cook this right, I may eat you instead. You may be barely more than bones, but at least you will be good for chewing’.” When Zenyatta imitates Genji’s words, Akande _hears_ Genji. Right out of those brackish lungs steps the swordsman he met years ago. His eyebrows lift.

“Charming.”

Genji had been silent back then, but Akande never imagined these were the words he was saving his breath for.

“I began this stew on this fire he made for me, and he went to seek the source of the curse. I told him it would not be long.” Zenyatta’s face lifts to the unforgiving forest past the flames.

“If he’s working on the curse, I’ll find him and we’ll solve it together.”

Zenyatta breaks towards him, his tentacles bunching in what Akande interprets as a chuckle. The flexion even lifts his cheeks, like a smile. But as Zenyatta studies him, the expression relaxes. Zenyatta raises his hands, and when Akande nods, frames his fingers around the upper half of Akande’s face. That weird velvet texture hugs his brow and eyelids.

“You do not remark on this wound.”

Akande knows what it looks like. Like Winter itself has taken residence in his pupils and cast a pall over sclera and iris alike. A curse all its own, the unwise would say. _Akande has officially become an old man,_ Akinjide would wink with an eye just as forlorn and pale.

“Because it is not a wound that concerns you or your curiosity. There just aren’t many doctors at the bottom of Adlersbrunn,” he explains. “Though from what you’ve told me, the ones at the top aren’t very good either.”

Zenyatta releases him, and from beneath the chains around his waist extracts what looks to be a dull and warped vegetable knife.

“Would you like one of my eyes?”

Akande raises his palm.

“It’s not necessary. I can see well enough. Thanks to my training, I don’t miss much of life. And the Countess has hired an alchemist to resolve the issue when I return.” Why did he not wait for the alchemist before embarking? Something about Lacroix not being able to contract the woman directly. There would be delays. Still, it was uncharacteristically impatient of him. “I admit you do have a lot to spare.”

Zenyatta raises the knife expectantly. Akande laughs and shakes his head, and Zenyatta puts the tool back in its place.

“It is good to hear that she is assisting you.” Zenyatta’s voice sounds velvet as his skin, stripped of its dissonant echoes. He clears up by the next sentence: “Perhaps when you return, your body will be hungry enough for my stew as well. Where it is cold, people turn to meat to survive. Are you cold, Akande?”

“A little.”

From the alcove Zenyatta retrieves a torn golden robe. There is a bloodstain right across the front. And what Akande sees, exposed by the moving cloth, are two abandoned swords resting on the stone. Genji without the tools of his art is unthinkable.

Zenyatta’s voice flutters in from afar.

“This may keep you warm.”

“It looks a little small for me,” Akande replies mechanically. In fact, the robe seems just the right size for a young Shambali pilgrim.

Zenyatta retracts the offering to his lap. He crooks the tips of his pinkies to the eyes on his palms and the rest of his fingers flatten out straight. His arms pace apart from each other, about the span of his torso. The floating eyes around him gravitate on the stringy robe, and it drifts up between his hands like a slowly turning flame.

Blood speckles off the fibers. Individual threads unspool from their mapped patterns, flinging outwards in fuzzy moth wings.

He does not just reshape the cloth but expands it. His arms open wide. Akande is pulled from the matter of the swords by the golden strings cast through the air.

“What god does that magic hail from?” He did not expect such shortcuts out of a fellow monk, but Zenyatta is unusual in several ways.

“This is not magic. I pour nothing into this but my spirit.”

Zenyatta never once flourishes his hands like a magician. His mudras hold steady until the golden cloth—grown into a large sanghati rectangle—settles back into his lap. He hands it over. As their fingers brush, Akande remembers _this_ is a part of the person he seeks too: good with a needle, and a powerful soul.

As he wraps the sanghati around his shoulders, he imagines Akinjide sitting in the warm temple hall made from the sunset-colored bends of a slot canyon. Ferns and red grapevines flourish in striped pots all around his teacher, and Akinjide pinches the green of his own robe. _Like fresh leaves,_ he says, and smiles at Akande from a world away. Smiles even as his portly bones must be sinking in on him with every passing year. That’s what the snow here reminds him of: Akinjide’s rows, but flowers between them instead of skin.

He touches his own head. His silver shave is holding for now, but he isn’t far behind his mentor. He folds his hands into the thick, silky yellow of the robe and grins. Akinjide, telling him to watch the iroko trees all day so he can spot when they change places with each other.

“Thank you. It does keep me warm.” He gets up from his seat and opens his blazing eyes. “A point of order before I go.” He gathers the spotted, brown, white, and black rabbits from the feet of the birches, running a stick through their loose napes and sticking them on the flame to roast properly. Any undifferentiated offal he dumps straight into the orange light, and he singes the leftover fur and blood from his palms when he’s done. “You can’t have such a messy campsite. Wolves fear the flame true, but blood will win them over eventually.”

“Wolves…they are larger than rabbits, are they not?”

Akande laughs. His throat hurts. He can’t remember the last time he spoke with someone for this long, or laughed this much.

“Of course. In my travels, I have seen them bigger than you.”

“But hopefully with more meat.” Zenyatta stares down his cauldron. “The broth is still thin.”

Akande shakes his head and rests a hand on the outcrop again as he ducks out from beneath it.

“I did not come here to end a curse, but if it’s in my way I suppose I have no choice. To our future meetings in brighter circumstances, my friend.”

_“Akande.”_ Even when the other monk could not possibly be of further use, he calls.

And even when he has already spent too much time consoling himself at a middling fire, Akande discovers he is bending back down and stifling his scowl to listen. “I have been making this stew for a long time,” Zenyatta says. “Genji has not come for his portion. They will be cold, and hungry.”

What was that at the end? Another memory skip? He worries that speaking again will invite his chatty counterpart to continue, so he waves instead. A proper goodbye is with his right hand, so huge metal fingers wobble at Zenyatta, campfire flashing a massive, grasping shadow down the hillside.

Akande heads deeper into the woods.


	2. Family Portrait

He follows a rabbit run to keep his legs from cutting the undergrowth. When he breathes, the wind brings him roses from the horizon. _Exposed_ is not the right word for how he feels in the fading woods. The day’s last light tracing his warm brown skin feels like laying down in someone’s arms—a moment where you can be naked without being afraid.

Akinjide calls restoratives in wilderness _projecting the body_ , healing by the affirmative power of one’s own senses. Akande is surprised by how easily the routine comes to him here. But he makes new roots with each step, seeking connection.

Curly sprite wings escape a tower of bugloss when his foot lands nearby. The wings twinkle around his sanghati, dewdrops, stars, and bugloss petals falling off his shoulders in their wake.

The pressure of the air on his skin changes, then a chime clangs through the trees to the north. It is the noise of temple bells at evening, warning students back to the dining hall.

He sees nothing in that direction, fog and bark. The sprite flees the sound, heading south through another copse of warped birches. Akande follows, a bright yellow candle between pale, bony trunks.

The sprite lands in the empty socket of a dragon skull, silver-blue of their wings opening and closing like a pupil. Akande scours the burial site. He discovers other scattered chunks: femur, tail, pinion-bone. The dragon isn’t large, still a pup, about thrice as long as Akande is tall.

Iron bars spear the hollows of its glossy vertebrae. Rotten ropes foul its long wing fingers. A pearly viewing bench faces the skeleton on the far side, perched amidst several such exploded taxidermies in the middle of the woods.

_Rare enough to see a single dragon,_ Akande tells himself as pins and needles clatter up his right shoulder.

Two columns of metal plaques sit on the viewing bench. Of all the manmade debris in the area, the plaques are the only items that strike him as orderly. The bench itself is webbed with cracks through the legs and greyed on one end by a coat of ashes. Crumbling walls between exhibits share the bench’s fragile monochrome brick.

Akande squints at the runes on the nearest plaque—it’s a title given to a dragon by their enemy. But as all the plaques have been gathered away from their victims, the names no longer hold power. He spots some evidence of the usher: narrow hoof-like signatures in the soft leaves around the bench. Three toemarks shadow off the front of each print. A Summoner, he guesses. Her visit looks recent.

But, he is rude to his host. The sprite’s wings buzz and circuitry embedded in the dragon skull heats from blue to angry red. Mushrooms nesting in the back of the brain cavity light up orange through the dotted glass of the skullcap.

“Oh, how terrifying you are.” Akande takes himself to one knee for the apology—a sprite is a capable Summoner in their own right. But this one’s wings slow before the dragon’s neck aligns into service and its jawbones hinge straight. Abandoned circuits fizzle back to ocean blue.

Akande cups the heat of his palm under the closed buds of the nearest bugloss. “Did I wake you early?”

The sprite dresses their body in the wavering sunlight: lustrous black diamond for their translucent skin, a visibly pumping ruby for their heart. They cross the gold candy stripes of their legs and shake their head. “Then may I ask why you revealed yourself?”

A blue rose sprouts from hands the color of the moon’s shadow. The sprite tosses the flower out of the eye socket, and Akande extends his hand to catch it. What falls to his palm is a circle of dead leaves. “…It seems that while I was locked away from your flowers, I allowed myself to forget your language. I looked for you in the Countess’s garden, but no one was there.”

The sprite skitters backwards under the shelter of the dragon’s craggy brow. “Come now. Her courtyard may be a little on the… _withered_ side, but with some guidance I am sure it would do well. It’s certainly large enough. And it even has a maze. If not you, then maybe someone you know. We will take your misfits and outcasts.” He circles his hand over his head and snaps his fingers, ignoring how it makes him look like an ancient uncle wishing that it would never rain. “Even those fools in the trees.”

The chime ripples through stew-colored clouds, louder and closer than before. The sprite darts to the back of the socket and hides under a mushroom cap. Akande stands. “And I will resolve my ignorance when Spring comes,” he says in mantra while he glares over his shoulder. The closest name in his mind is Genji, but the chief feature of Genji’s presence is _silence._

The dragon head goes dark. He is alone again, save the call to the north.

As he walks, spots of rain slap into his head, making him blink hard. “Are you joking?” he demands of the sky, which answers with a downpour flowing red past the sunset. He tugs the generous excess of the sanghati over his nose and mouth.

The affectionate sprite stays in his mind. Spirits so rarely have bodies and breath, they must long for interaction. To be touched, to speak, to feel pain. He understands the drive to leave heaven, even if the only way back is through a flower. This world is the only one where life is complete. Spirits remember the value in being human, though sometimes their love takes strange forms.

Only once suitably drowned can he hear the breath of a river. He tracks its steady murmurs, listening past the raindrops popping on his gauntlet.

He finds the water murky red, surface obscured by last Autumn’s leaves. What takes his eyes is the tree.

The tree grows on the far shore, its root splitting a boulder of the same waxy white he saw in the gallery walls. It is a camphor tree. He recognizes the giant snaking boughs from back home. Even if his eyes failed, he would know it by the spice of its chipped bark, a campfire lit against the roof of his mouth.

Oozing snow drags the camphor boughs in arcs to the boulder. Red berries smothered in ice dip from hand-shaped bushes at the base. Blue vines feather from the root to the moldy shimenawa at the middle of the trunk. The leaves proliferate through the straw rope in a profane mockery of its intention.

Yet Akande sighs in delight. He sees the camphor just a few months from now, fully fleshed with electric green leaves.

This soft, human sound draws the eyes of the camphor’s inhabitant. From his vantage on the southern shore, Akande discerns a red mask with clenched canines and a long nose. Rain beads an icicle from the nose’s tip.

He sees storm wind projecting through lightning-white flares of a theatric beard and brow. He sees uneven ripples carved through wood and living skin. The man in red wears the uniform of a yamabushi, sashes rippling from his belt. Such ascetics would not be out of place in this confluence of nature. They would come here to project their bodies and find themselves in the pungent bark and icy water.

The muffled sun draws a gleam down the man’s back: an elegant silver bow haft, sharing space with a quiver full of golden arrows. A ring fastened to the bow’s upper limb sways precariously in the wind until it strikes the body of the weapon. Akande hears the chime trickle through but it’s a tiny noise, barely more than the rain.

_They_ would be cold, Zenyatta said.

He touches his heart beneath the sanghati: drum-steady, a counter to the weeping wedding in the air. The sanghati is holding up in the weather too, still soft and dry on its inner sunflower surfaces, not like the soaked bandages hardening to mortar around his calves. Prepared, Akande gives a name to the imposter in the camphor tree:

“Evening, Hanzo. Good hunting?”

Hanzo’s stately figure sinks to a crouch. He scavenges at the camphor trunk, rain slithering down his chest and leaving slugs of ice. When he stands, his hand clasps an unfortunately familiar gourd. “I knew you wouldn’t make much of an ascetic,” Akande jokes. Hanzo uncorks the gourd and tips its golden contents against his mask’s locked fangs. His head rolls back and his red throat bobs.

He drapes his arm at Akande, black-nailed hand limp, alcohol sobbing off his elbow.

The hand flicks at Akande. _Come closer._

Akande calculates the span of the river, a preliminary charge winding through his gauntlet. The river edge steams where it touches the warmer air. “Where’s Genji—”

He remembers the sound for the rest of his life.

His right shoulder already knows it, swollen and leaden inside his gauntlet, blood metamorphosing into camphor cinnamon. When he was young it came at his right side.

The sound of wind playfully ruffling feathers on diving wings behind him.

The world arrives on his left, and Akande turns, putting enough of his shoulder in the way that the beak trying to rip out his neck gets only silk and skin. The forest wheels as dense muscle latches into his spine. Wet blue hands wrap his throat and forehead, curved nails streaking past his eyes.

Akande glimpses Hanzo as he’s twisting his gauntlet at the other attacker. Hanzo’s hands, far from welcoming, are placed together in front of his chin. When he sees Akande looking at him, he dips his iced over nose. _Thank you for the meal._

Though Akande believes he will get nothing but feathers with his reactionary grab, the gauntlet meets a ribcage and fiercely beating heart. Genji doesn’t even try to dodge. Akande wrenches his clamped beak off his shoulder.

Sanghati rags burn in the Swordsman’s mouth as Akande pulls him around front. The beak that has taken over his face shudders open silent and wide, showing insides the color of blood without a clear throat or tongue.

Akande’s grit teeth close as he watches dirty feathers strain and break under his impenetrable fingers. His trained response is to crush the pulsing sack of organs. He delays it. “You still have nothing to say to me, Genji?” That hungry mouth springs forth, neck warping to close the gap.

With a new track of blood on his lip, Akande restrains Genji further away. When Genji starts coughing, he eases his grip a second time. “You reprise our battle without your friends, or even a weapon. You were magnificent last time. Did they tell you?” He lowers his voice as he presses the gauntlet thumb over Genji’s head, mashing his beak closed. “What could you have possibly lost that made you prey for a demon?”

Steam rises wherever the gauntlet rests on Genji’s chilled blue skin. The rain falls on his feathered head and ices over as it dribbles down the plane of his beak. Genji worms a few fingers out from the top of his cage. His claws are tangled with sanghati threads. He notices the yellow and lays his head low, sniffing.

A chime rings the river like a cry for help.

The arrow fills the sky. Akande sees the Archer in the tree behind it and plans beyond his first reaction. The shriek of the ring on Hanzo’s bow looses together with his arrow—an assassin that gives warning.

The shot aims at Akande’s face. He could block with the gauntlet’s back panels. But he lifts Genji, centers him, and unwraps one of the shiny fingers protecting his back.

The arrow plunges home with a chunky staccato. That bloody beak irises wide. Hanzo is lining a second shot but his bow drops when he sees the result of the first. Good. Akande revs the gauntlet back and whips Genji forward at the boulder founding Hanzo’s unlikely perch. Genji smashes against the rock and collapses under the river’s mat of leaves.

Akande moves. A leap over the water. Surging the gauntlet _up._ Breaking and avoiding a few more arrows hastily fired. He is the one who flies and hunts. He’s already pulling his fist back. With his left arm he seeks to keep Hanzo in place. One of those fuzzy straps on the front of his stolen uniform will do.

The flood of rancid gold from the eyes of Hanzo’s mask slows. He lowers his bow. The mask’s unwieldy fangs crack apart, the red lips around them living, sneering.

“Struggle until your dying breath. You will never reach.”

Gravity with interest tugs Akande off his trajectory.

Genji’s talons snarl around his chest. Akande never heard him leave the water because _the water is still carrying him._ At the hips Genji twists together into a rope of braided blue flesh. Dead leaves fall from his sides as scales blood out of his long, glistening surfaces. Hanzo’s arrow juts from his shoulder like a severed wingbone. Pieces of him wrap around the gauntlet, tie Akande’s back, loop over his head. The river writhes with his coils. He opens his silent beak and the clouds above flash and break with thunder.

Akande’s fingers brush the white threads puffing from Hanzo’s uniform just before he is dragged into the scaly river.


	3. Scratched Out Face

The river is a sword through him. Genji lands first, his worming bulk kicking up nails of ice-water.

Then Akande breaks the mirror with his spine and his every limb cracks. He oozes out in every direction.

Genji lands last, too.

His skin is screaming. Underwater and all his lungs want to do is _inhale._ Through the circle of leaves in his wake he sees Hanzo’s red mask staring down at him.

Winter still lives in the river. Akande drifts through the blood of the season, the texture of it flickering between floodwaters and an airless pit of snakes.

He doesn’t realize his eyes have closed until light covers his eyelids and he picks out his own struggling veins. The heart of a distant forest breathes into him, gleaming purple and volcanic amber from his gauntlet. Courses of bubbles flurry away as Akande closes the metal around himself.

Genji thrashes with his leg, yanking his whole body down. As he warms enough to process pressure into pain, he feels Genji’s talons rocking between the bones of his toes. Copper and iodine swarm against his sealed lips. The stench burns his eyes when Genji bites into his thigh.

How many seconds has it been? His lungs feel narrow but not empty. He’s keen to his body’s limits—part of the process of breaking through them. The most damaging attack would be on the part of Genji that isn’t thick congealing water. But he can’t reach that low. Akinjide’s gauntlet is keeping him alive and he can’t move it from his torso.

He stretches the fingers of his left hand. Once they feel operable, he lifts his ringfinger to the bottom of his thumb and extends his arm into the gooey leaf-filled water.

Using his elbow while he holds the mudra, he hooks a passing column of blue scales and bunches it to his chest. Genji’s beak gnaws and snaps, giving no notice of the modification to the river’s flow. Akande has ample time to cuddle the gauntlet over the throbbing coil and snare his powerful fingers into a fleshy fin upheld by rigid spines.

He contracts his right arm and the ribbon breaks. Oily bubbles bump his skin from below, followed by Genji’s climbing claws.

_Wait for the candles of his eyes._

Genji anchors him with a round of muscle swirling against his legs and stomach.

The fire rears at his face. Akande burns the gauntlet forward, catching the orange light on his knuckles. Genji spirals backwards and strikes the deep foot of the boulder.

The river around Akande goes into spasms, the coils for his body writhing off. A huge tail with a veiny paddles slashes open the leaves on the surface. Shouldering the nearest quivering blue loop, Akande kicks to the fissure of sunlight.

His head emerges patched with leaves and his lungs fill. The fins of the mass on his shoulder flap erratically and he bites his fingers in to keep his grip. He swims to the shore with the boulder and the camphor. _No way to go but forward._

The freezing air makes a fist around his body as he leaves the water. His age sinks through him: every morning muscle ache, every late afternoon spike through the bones of his legs and hand. He stops with his ankles still breaking the current, exhalations thin and high. Swallowing, groaning because swallowing hurts, he steps out and positions himself to haul in his catch. Yet as Genji’s briny stocking leaves the river his scales shed, leaving Akande with only the considerably smaller bird on his shoulder.

So he pushes up the shore, victorious. Four or five steps, until his legs ache too badly to move. The river sups at the red slick marking his path.

Water trickling from Genji’s beak erupts into a larger icy mass that splashes dark on the ground. For the first time, Akande hears him breathe. A cry that belongs to a man rakes his throat. He gasps when Akande lays a hand over the small of his back. His freshly grown iridescent feathers prick on-end.

As waves of wings sketch their anatomy then molt from Genji’s back, Akande feels his way to the section of spine behind his stomach. He knuckles in an even, steady circle. Genji’s feathers fall and the rashes of wings break off for good. He returns to his pastime of coughing up purple and red ice.

“I’m going to withhold judgement on that performance,” Akande assures him. “Even if it ended the same way as last time for you.”

_“Let him go.”_

Hanzo stands in front of him, slender legs fouled by the slush of the earth, bow ready. Like the tree he came from, Akande would always know him by smell if not sight. Bitter, spoiled drink lives in his skin.

“Oh, Hanzo. I was just coming up to see you.” Akande aims for confidence, but his own words wheeze strangely in his ears.

“Unhand him, Akande.”

“I can do that. I’ve already finished the fight. Here.” Akande finds himself staggering to lay Genji on the bank. Ice-water drips from his ear as his hands separate from Genji’s shivering figure.

Hanzo the Archer kneels at his feet. Akande swallows, misty eyes a little wider. For a moment he doesn’t hurt. For a moment he’s awake and ready for a long overdue conversation. It is never too late to accept an offer.

But this is only the appearance of a dream, not its realization. The false thrill is chased by nausea.

Hanzo shelves his bow and spreads his hands over the arrow in Genji’s shoulder. He pries into the wound with his fingers. Twisting the arrow back up its spiral of entry, he summons the barbs of the head to the surface. His hands rearrange on Genji’s back like a red spider’s legs. He plucks the shaft loose without breakage or seeming effort, no spoon of Diocles needed. Genji he pulls from the dirt, resting his side on his lap.

“You should not ridicule him for failing to meet your expectations,” Hanzo says as he embraces Genji, holding the bloody arrow flat against his chest.

Akande’s grey shadow swallows both brothers. Rain deflates Hanzo’s uniform, sticks Genji’s feathers to his skin, makes icy prisms of their warring primary colors. Akande isn’t sure what to make of the pink-stained soil under his sandals, but for Hanzo he tries to kneel, so they can have that one good discussion.

Where his heart has been shy it suddenly booms in his ears.

Softness in his legs robs him of balance and he drops, catching himself on his gauntlet knuckles. He’s panting like Genji in the mud, like a man drowned. His breath leaves visible white squalls in the frigid air. Hanzo releases no such evidence of life from his bared fangs as he watches.

Breathing here is like swallowing daggers, but deep breaths settle the arrhythmia. Turnover in his stomach persists, but Akande replaces queasiness with action, resuming his original plan: he unwraps the sodden bandages on his left arm and holds them out. His revealed skin is marbled and ashen.

He smiles.

“Zenyatta wanted me to tell you that the stew is ready.”

Dry leaves rasp together; Hanzo laughs.

“I saw your eyes, and I thought you were the first person he disapproved of so much that he would not heal you. He would befriend a god of death, but he turned you down. It was a delicious thought.”

“The god of death would be a good friend to have,” Akande coughs. “And sure to be lonely, as he has no worshippers among the living. Zenyatta did offer, but his methods seem unconventional. Is he truly a great healer?”

Quiet, Hanzo tips Genji to examine the freed wound in his back. Akande can see the stain of it reflected on his yamabushi cotton. His eyes travel to Genji’s legs, which kick occasionally despite ending in broken talons and shattered ankles. What will Zenyatta give to heal those?

Hanzo finally accepts the cold bandages from Akande’s shivering arm.

“I too have doubted Zenyatta, to my sorrow.”

“Is that why you’ve brought your brother to this river instead of back to him? Tell me what your plan was.” Akande leans his head right, closer to the sprawling snow-covered boughs behind him. “Did you intend to borrow the tree’s life to help him?”

“The camphor reminds me of my home.” Akande does not see steam exit Hanzo’s teeth, but he notices Hanzo’s chest lift, hold, and exhale at studious pace. This duress wasn’t present when Hanzo saw the gauntlet flying for him.

He wonders if Hanzo has ever watched a wedding under inter-tangled camphor crowns and realized that somehow it was not meant for him, that he was exiled by the very way the ceremony was structured. And how warm it felt when he suggested changes and Akinjide thought it was a great idea. Everyone pulls him under the falling green leaves and they change history right there.

He has a suspicion Hanzo might be best represented by one of the uncles withdrawing from the ceremony muttering about tradition. But he’s already projecting far, taking too much out of the reflections he sees in the rain.

“Zenyatta said you ventured out to end the curse.”

“We did. There was a spirit willing to guide us west.” Hanzo breaks the bandage’s tail on his outsize fangs, then uses it to clean Genji’s beak. “Genji attacked them. I thought the river would help him…but the water is unclean. Look!” He thrusts the arrow he pulled from Genji at the spotted slush around Genji’s head, his voice clearing its base of gravel and finding the thunderclap. “Look at how much poison has come out of him!”

Akande thinks to mimic Hanzo’s caretaking with the many gifts Genji has left him on his shoulders, back, and legs. He reaches back while keeping his eyes on Hanzo and touches his calves. His hand is instantly slippery.

The dripping fire of Hanzo’s eyes reflects on his skin. “At least I can be grateful he killed you when he pulled you into the river. Your blood will run out, you will freeze, and you will be dead before the sun rises. Never again must I listen to Akande Ogundimu’s pleas for aid.”

Akinjide says, _When the day comes, may my final words never be in anger._

A yamabushi goes white-haired on a mountaintop, and even if he never meets another soul he says his life is a success. His accumulated wisdom is never shared freely, but given only to those who chance upon his tracks. He pretends he is a spirit, locked to a single stone or flower for his entire life.

Akinjide will spend forty more years sinking deeper into his garden, surrendering his ability to teach and walk and feed himself and speak. He will spend his final hours blissful among grapes and green things, so quiet even his death will go unnoticed until it comes time for a student to retrieve him. This is the way of the ascetic: pursuit of enlightenment free from the complications of human interaction. Not looking at trees to ground yourself but looking at trees as replacements for _people._

Humanity is why Akande does not live in Akinjide’s temple anymore. People can rejoice with full knowledge that the moment won’t last. They can suffer. They can grow exponentially. To be a monk is to walk—no one goes to heaven until everyone can. He makes his fists and looks down at them. His arms are shaking. Someone in these Wilds has been wronged. Someone is suffering. Someone drives humanity to the edge of its potential and its pain.

_If the day comes and the world is still unjust, may my final words call down a storm._

“Do you know what I think?”

“Oh, I thought you had already slipped away,” Hanzo sneers.

“You do not return to Zenyatta because it is not your wish to help your brother. You seek to preserve a comfortable tradition: the wise older brother—” He rattles his hand at Hanzo’s costume. “—managing his wild younger sibling, who like any child has no true voice. No control. That is the story that keeps you warm when you feel fear, though from what I can see it is doing a poor job.” Through his chattering teeth, Akande grins. “The malice I felt from him was only in part his own. The rest was a reflection, and you would blame the water.”

The bruises of the northern sky sing thunder. Lightning pounds on the glass bellies of the clouds. Snowflakes clamber out to seal Akande’s fate. Fog grains the sunset and the world turns blue.

“You dare accuse me of betraying him again.” Hanzo’s teeth chatter too, fangs ripping apart. “I would never do such a thing to someone who has given me the world!” He tears down his cap and lowers his white head, pulling Genji close. Snow buries Genji’s broken bones. The golden chime on Hanzo’s bow sways and clinks as he rocks his fallen brother.

“Do you truly not know how to ask for help? Are you so lacking in humility?” Akande does almost beg. He can feel the candle under his fingertips.

“My brother is the one who showed me the value in such things.”

“When the Countess told me you were childish, I didn’t understand what she meant.” Hanzo’s wooden face flashes up at him with its only available expression of outrage. Akande cracks the ice formed over his skin by leaning forward. He places the back of his left hand in the snow. It is difficult to show the gauntlet’s open palm, but he manages. He just must careful not to slip. He doesn’t imagine he would get back up if he did. “If that is what he gave you, then did you teach him to speak here? I assume he does. Zenyatta mentioned it.”

“He does not need to be taught anything. He just doesn’t like you.” Hanzo snarls his laughter as snow sticks to his face. “I contribute nothing. I am the one who—” He catches himself. Reassembles behind his mask. “I do not have to listen to the words of someone already dead,” he hisses.

“About that… I was thinking you will do nicely to prevent my death.”

“Do I look like a monk to you?”

“You look like immense power in a brittle container.” Hanzo’s mask is already blood-red, so Akande noticing his cheeks lighting up does not involve his eyes. “If you don’t know how to ask directly for what you need, you should listen and take every opportunity presented to you, no matter who is speaking. I will tell you what to do. After I leave, you will return Genji to his teacher. Once you feel assured of his recovery, you will find my trail and return to me. We end the curse of this place together. You _will_ rescue your brother.”

“I know what you are trying to do. You take people and you never stop taking. You march them one step after another.”

“That is…” Akande’s breath falters, but he finds it again. “…how my world works. One step at a time. Every opportunity to reevaluate your position that I can give you. You are mistaken, Hanzo. I am not asking for your help. I am asking you to do the best thing you can to achieve your own objectives.”

“You sound like him. Him and Zenyatta. How can that be?”

“I am a simple monk. It seems they reached the same conclusion that I did about this world.”

Hanzo hasn’t let go of the arrow in his hand. He stares at it now with his hollow gold eyes. Thunder howls through the blizzard tipping over on all three of them.

“Close your eyes and I will help you,” he whispers. His voice rises to its pebbly norm as he continues, “You would not want to witness the arcane sorcery and have it tempt you, Monk.”

“Try me,” Akande snorts.

“Close your eyes or die.”

To that Akande can only concede. He hears Hanzo lay Genji down on the bed of ice. His shadow travels strangely, first at Akande’s side, then looming behind him. His uniform billows gentle as feathers as he reaches for the inner curve of Akande’s right shoulder.

Akande doesn’t mean to tense. He tries to think of his open hands on the ground, the freedom in holding them without intention of defense, but his muscles only relax when Hanzo brushes the sanghati and the fabric pops with smoke. The man behind him issues a less than elegant grunt and Akande smiles to himself.

A pair of fingers still crackling from divine reprimand plow into the softness between his spine and shoulderblade. Hanzo’s hand is freezing. The fingers feel like they’re tunneling to Akande’s ribcage without breaking his skin.

Hanzo calls it sorcery, but Akande never hears a spellword, nor detects the colored flashes of runes at the corners of his closed eyes. The world becomes wind and static, frying water from his clothing and tearing death from its lonely roots in his wounds.

“You could have killed him all those years ago.” Hanzo’s breath hits the back of his neck colder than the blizzard. “You...would have made a mockery of our story.”

“It wasn’t personal. And despite what happened to him, he achieved his goal. He saw the justice he wanted in it. I hope you aren’t holding a grudge.”

Hanzo releases him. Akande opens his eyes to a steady heart and dry clothing aside from where his knees rest in the snow. Hanzo stalks back around him toward Genji. The arrow is no longer in his hand.

Akande grazes his lips and shoulder. There are rough ripples left in his skin, but nothing bleeds. The sanghati has not grown back where Genji tore through it, but it once again embraces him like a hearth. He tests his legs and his nerves yowl up like he’s been sleeping on them, but they serve.

He clears his throat. “Do you believe this is all the spite of a dead Witch?”

“I thought so when we first arrived.” Hanzo stands with his brother in his arms, his back to Akande. “But the trees are old here for being so close to town. There are many spirits. That monk felt his Iris so strongly that he passed out while walking. I have never even seen him sleep before.”

“What happened to the head Genji took?”

“The so-called Lord of Adlersbrunn placed it on a pike.” Hanzo faces Akande and the river. His brother’s head rests against the padded shoulder of his uniform, breathing evenly, as through a dream.

“And the body? Was it burned?”

“I do not know.”

“You’ve forgotten?”

“I left to celebrate our victory.” Hanzo tips his bearded chin at the gourd sharing space with a white fan on his belt.

“You are spectacularly unhelpful,” Akande laughs as he refolds the sanghati. Hanzo heads toward the river, but Akande’s gauntlet catches him on the shoulder. He only has room to rest the edge of his palm, but Hanzo stops walking and obliges him with a glare. “What about you, Hanzo?” That red snarl tilts quizzically. “If you’re feeling cooperative, I have far gentler rites of demonic purification I can try when we are done with this.”

Hanzo’s face pulls back in surprise. His mouth is a static mask again. His voice comes from behind it.

“You use that word too easily.” He scrapes his fingers through the blue feathers on Genji’s head. “You must take care not to become an unscrupulous Hunter, destroying any spirit you come across.”

“Usually I draw the line at the ones who try to eat me,” Akande smirks. “But everyone deserves their best life, including you.”

“The world even as it is has much to teach us.” Hanzo closes his eyes, flame briefly abated. Akande wonders what he sees that he must look away from.

“Hanzo, if you need someone to talk to who is not quite so close to your family—”

“You will not always be so eager to see me!” Hanzo bristles. “I gave you a little time now for a little time later. That is all.” He pushes past the gauntlet and carries Genji to the river. Before Akande can even turn, a crash shakes the water.

His knees are swift and responsive even in the blizzard. What he sees is the camphor tree no more. Hanzo stands beside the lightning struck hollow of a fir, fallen now to the water in pieces. His “boulder” is a few charred crumbs of white walls lying in the silt at the river’s edge.

The ripples of the crash are soon taken by the current. Hanzo exhales slowly, looking down at the pieces of himself he can see through the disturbed leaves. He calls out to Akande: “I would not be surprised if some drunkard threw the Witch’s body in the moat, and its decay has since polluted the entire aquifer.” Akande raises his eyebrows.

Hanzo walks south past the ashen ruins, his split-toed sandals crossing the coursing water as if it were a marble floor. He leaves no more footprints in the river than he does in the snow before it. His red back sways between steps like a moving mound of blood.

* * *

Akande searches for a blue rose in the west.

Everything is blue in the dusk tonight.

The moon rises full and blue. A cliff crawls out beneath its light, smooth, sheer face bloated in one section by a peninsula of tree roots. A blue haze hides the cliff’s other face; he can’t see what the plants are straining towards. But when he gets close he sees they are ample and firm enough to walk on.

The river, his constant southern companion, transforms into a hissing waterfall that streams blue into the ravine below.

Akande crouches next to the bridge of roots and examines the ravine floor. He can see a few calm shimmers of the settled water, but also dozens of faces smiling up at him from the dirt. Their eyes and grins are drawn with candlelight. The drop is considerable. He needs a safe way down.

Like the strike of a clock a blue flame appears among the smiling faces. It winks along the ravine, hypnotic. It’s coming towards him. When it hits the foot of the cliff under him it immediately begins to trace a path upwards. His eyes move ahead of it, finding the moonlit warrens where his feet could take purchase.

Akande feels two cold fingers press against his back. He jumps to his feet on the cliff edge, turning a circle, seeing no one. He folds his left arm behind him and rubs under the sanghati. He can still feel the spot of frost on his skin, though the snow has long stopped.

The moon finishes breaking away from the horizon and he hears a splash from the river.

He isn’t given time to turn towards it before the arrow hits. His right arm goes numb and a frozen blast of wind and lightning ragdolls him into the air.

_“Hanzo!”_ he screams as the gauntlet swallows the electricity, sparing his heart the deadly jolt.

_For my brother,_ the arrow answers. It is made of ice, its colors muted, but Akande makes out Genji’s frozen blood on the shaft.

He plunges into the blue night, his only onlookers the pumpkins on the ravine floor, all of them smiling as he rushes towards them.


	4. Lady On Fire

The knocks of the Countess’s riding boots announce her to the library.

“News on the Alchemist?” Akande asks without looking up from a plan drawing of Adlersbrunn Castle.

When Lacroix’s shadow crosses his desk, but she doesn’t answer, he nudges up the gold bifocals she loaned him. Sparing candlelight cuts around her sharp outline. The violet of her coat and the orange tongue of her tie dye the room her color. A red book and a blue book make bulky wings under her sleeves.

“She won’t be here tonight.” Lacroix proffers the red book to him. Akande makes room between his other open texts. Delivery accomplished, Lacroix turns heel and proceeds to the sculpted grand desk nearby. Akande thumbs dust bunnies off the red book’s spine.

“If your goal is to keep me from leaving out of boredom, it’s a success,” he chuckles. Lacroix smirks at she sets into her moldy velvet chair. “So, what might this book you saw fit to keep apart from your library contain?”

“A century of local events, dictated by myself. The notes in that book need to be compiled and edited into a final manuscript. Why don’t you work on it?”

“Interesting. Who’s the transcriber?” Lacroix shades her yellow eyes at him as she takes a fresh parchment and quill from her desk drawer. Akande’s fingers spike into the notebook’s leathery cover. “I see. I didn’t realize he had the time.”

“The Witch doesn’t need him at every hour. And sometimes there are things she doesn’t want him to see.” It is unusual for Lacroix to linger. No one better to sit and watch night after night, but if it’s not a target she would just as soon be elsewhere. Right now, her eyes are fixed on him.

He lets himself into the book, peeling past the blank first page. Concerted as a waltz, Lacroix drops her stare and rifles through the book she’s kept for herself.

Imagining himself unwatched, Akande peeks back. The blue book has a title: _Mysteries of the Sea._ Lacroix needles her quill into the conch-shaped inkpot on her desk. The quill vein swells with iridescent color. Statues of eely creatures with horned beaks and flipper tails guard the curving twin stairs behind her.

Akande rests his eyes to the notebook’s first page of text. It’s a list of interview dates. He sits back in his chair and wood squeaks. _“What’s wrong?”_ Lacroix’s voice cuts into his ear.

“This interview took place fifty years ago.”

“And?”

He props his chin on his knuckles, staring at the dates.

“Five years before I was even born.” He drops his hand to the yellow page and turns it. “It’s nothing. I don’t have a problem with it.”

“I will assist you if there is something your youth prevents you from understanding.”

Akande’s lips rumple, a mimic of a smile covering clenched teeth. He inhales through his nose, narrows his eyes, and leaves the Countess a shadow on his peripheral as he turns the red book’s pages.

Within moments he is laughing, hearty booms that shake the shelf spiders in their webs.

“He wrote this as an illuminated manuscript.”

“He does enjoy varnishing the details.”

“But these are _notes._ Not even complete sentences.” Akande drags his accusatory fingertip down the page’s ink filigree. Portraits of hounds and horses vine through the white space between events, a birthday welded to each frame. Without their deaths so ruthlessly catalogued, the sketched animals live forever.

One horse at the bottom is labeled _Hellfire_. The portrait shows a rather innocuous black stallion without any sign of a birthdate. His breed is lavished on the portrait frame ( _Einsiedler_ ) amidst troops of angel wings and flaming swords, presentation somewhat undermined by a single-word note hastily scrawled beneath: _mine._

Akande’s cheeks are warm—from the laughing—as he resumes judgement. “Listen to this:

_2 February—bandits hiding in blue hills, His estate;_

_10 February—haunting at southern vineyard;_

_27 February—the little Lord tries Basler brunsli, should have told her he liked it even if that chocolate was lifeless and chalky;_

_2 March—bandits no longer a problem;_

_1 April—latrine golem._ ”

“It was an entertaining year,” Lacroix snickers.

“He has a quote from you that says, ‘I have purchased anew my family home in Annecy and will be restoring it this summer’. Is that so?”

“He would never lie about what I say.”

“I didn’t realize you ever wanted to go back there.”

“I did acquire the deed, and I do visit, just a little less often than planned. Lately my business has been here.” She pins open _Mysteries of the Sea_ with the thumb of her left hand. “Was he really making sketches the whole time while he was supposed to be listening to me?”

“No. I see reference lines here, and here.” His hand spreads messily, greedily on the page, then yanks itself back like he might somehow disturb the half-century-old ink. “He makes a framework when he asks you for the summary of the year’s events, then he fills in the drawings later. I can see the logic he’s using to choose the pictures, how he’s connecting the summary to the details of each event further down the page…”

Inspired, he gestures at Lacroix’s book. “Have you ever gone swimming in the ocean?”

The flicker of his hand raises her eyes, and they reflect the candlelight red. Snail shells and dried starfish twinkle around the rim of her desk. It is a foolish question born too soon, but Lacroix shows no irritation. Always to him she has been open and decisive.

“Yes. I am writing this author to issue some corrections.” She tips _Mysteries of the Sea_ side-to-side.

“Does the sunlight not feel as strong when you are deep in the water?”

“If you go deep enough there is no light at all.”

He turns the page and there is portrait of the Countess wearing the same jacket and boots that she is wearing tonight. Another turn and sketches of other outfits appear, complete with hem lengths and ingredient lists for dyes. A suit of armor and a webbed sword, a red evening robe, a servant’s tailcoat paired with a wooden mask.

He turns the page. Aside from that one comment on the horse, this handwriting is not meant to be read. It is for filling the eye, making spectacle. The page feels like touching lightning. Its colored inks cast sunlight and make shadows. He grins boyishly. It is only when the bifocals slip down his nose that he thinks to start finding letters.

“Fate is always drawn after,” he reads. “Destiny is the name used to rationalize decisions no one wants to accept responsibility for. They say ‘he’s in heaven now’. They say it was a plan. But you have to hold your head high. You are not a plaything.”

His eyebrows lift at Lacroix. “Your words?” Her face creases with the lightest of frowns.

“Non. Does he frame it as something I said?”

“He scribbled it in the corner of this page about a plague.”

“The vintage was awful that year,” she sighs.

The border for the notes on the plague event is a drawing of interwoven strangler vines, with a birch inscribed at every corner.

Akande realizes he is holding his breath.

“I’m leaving tonight,” he says, standing, putting together the coat and bag hanging off the back of his chair. He takes special care to secure his pouch of baked goods where it can’t be crushed. His gauntlet is conveniently propped on a nearby bench—he assembles it over the prosthetic of his right arm. He closes the notebook tenderly, then shoulders his ample supplies. The coat Lacroix had tailored custom, no right sleeve. Tailors are much easier to conjure than alchemists, though the gray wool feels lifeless on his muscles.

“It would be unwise to depart in the dark,” Lacroix finally comments as he crosses the library’s threshold. Her concern, as always, sounds perfunctory. Akande catches himself on the doorframe. “You realize the target foolishly fled west, towards Dracula’s castle.”

“The moon is down. He’s already found whoever he wants to drink tonight.” An ache webs between Akande’s eyes. He rubs his face. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”

The Countess rises to her feet. Seawater trickles from the empty snail shells and drips off the edge of her desk. The dry coral skeletons on the bookshelves eject colorful polyps.

“We had this conversation. It’s real.”

“I’m falling.” Akande looks at the sandstone under his feet. Lacroix’s boots mush across the softening floor towards him. “If I don’t wake up, I’ll die.” He glances at her as she assembles at his side. Her hair frames her ash-white face like the dropped wings of a raven. Behind her the bannisters of the second-floor staircases lift as milky, pulsing tentacles.

“I told you it’s not just Dracula. His Immortal has been sighted alone out of the castle for the first time in decades.” She shuts her eyes. The library sounds with the echoes of a hound baying in the garden. “Then, the next thing you said was…”

“Did I see anything in the notebook about dragons?”

“That wasn’t it at all. Why do you ask?”

“I saw bodies in the woods.”

The Countess smiles. Water drips out of the ceiling and where it touches her lips and feathered hair it wicks away into smoke. She leans closer, taking the three-armed candle beside the library door. Guttural crackles, scraps of a noise too deep for human ears, churn the dark chandelier above the reading desks.

“Those bones have been stolen more than once. It was far longer ago than a century that the dragons were slain in their roosts. Take care that you don’t become stuck in someone else’s dream like they did. We can all stop time in our own way.” The red book is in her free hand. She holds it out to him. “Why don’t you work on it?”

And she lifts the candle as though to demonstrate, but when she blows across the flames, she is the one who evaporates to ashes.

* * *

_Breathe,_ Akande.

Sulfur brines his throat. His back is numb and heavy, so his knees spike up, but he can’t lift his shoulders. Raspy textures that he doesn’t recognize snake around his skin. Panting, choking, his eyes spring open. Coiled leather wings fragment a low dirt ceiling. A translucent face leans over him.

“Oh no!” The pupiless light of her eyes widens. Through the greenish gauze of her cheeks he sees the roots of a tree sprouting through the walls. Blue roses open one-by-one around a hollow in the distance, where the tawny arteries run thickest. The flowers frame her softly glowing body as she reaches for his mouth.

His right arm punches into the wall beside him, a belated response to the shouts of his brain. His fingers tangle in peat moss. As his shaking hand pulls back, he sees a wooden prosthetic laid bare. His gauntlet is gone. The sanghati has been stripped from his torso and replaced with scraps of scratchy bandaging.

“Oxton…” he protests through the barely solid palms crisscrossed over his mouth. The swell of his lungs sends another dizzying pang through his back.

“Don’t!” she urges. Behind her the last blue rose blooms, and the earthen hollow illuminates with fire. A field of falling gold cascades between deer brown fences. Birds fly like jewels from orange-crowned oaks. The exit to the sunset of Adlersbrunn shimmers and ripples. Akande grabs the overgrown wall, wrenching himself from the fatal numbness of his back, slipping a leg off the rocky ledge he’s been stuffed into. Oxton’s wispy hands bite into his shoulders.

Two boots crunch into wet soil somewhere in the rotten grotto. Oxton freezes in place. Akande mimics her, staring through the dark at the echoing noise. He’s in some sort of alcove. The wall to his left blocks his view of the guest.

Oxton recovers and holds a finger to her lips, her shoulders going high with each breath. Akande’s eyes flash around the alcove: he finds the sanghati folded up in a slot on the wall beside a trio of smirking jack-‘o’-lanterns, but he doesn’t see the gauntlet. He lets go of the dripping moss and sets himself back down on his elbows.

She lets go of him right away and kneels to collect an armful of mummified leaves off the floor. She scatters them over him. “Don’t breathe. Still as death, alright?”

Well, he’s certainly had enough practice lately.

He turns onto his left side, taking the weight from his right shoulder. The unannounced boots drag into the grotto tunnel, accompanied by the rocky plunges of horse hooves.

Ceiling is too low for riding, he notes. The grotto is like a throat soft in its frame, ever on the verge of decay and collapse. Oxton’s body of pinstripe trousers and a black jack-coat releases from the iron chains riddling her torso. She stands twice as tall as a formless flame that blocks the entrance to the alcove. Akande pulls his toes out of her blue halo.

A steel-tipped boot crashes into view, smoke gushing from its liners. The odor of rain pushes against the grotto’s acid wash. Oxton’s flame is perfectly see-through. The charred silver hilt of a sword chimes through her light, a gloved hand resting near it. Wet horse hooves and the animal’s bowed head chase the tailcoat of its rider.

Snaps and pops crackle through the grotto as the horseman twists Oxton’s way. Where his face should be lies a cast of orange, but it could be the sunset reflecting on his high cowl. In the grotto dark it is hard for Akande’s eyes to separate him from the many legs of his horse.

He doesn’t spare Oxton more than a glance. He leads the horse to the Adlersbrunn window. As the animal’s back end crosses into the firelight, Akande sees a bloodless head upright on its side, hitched to the saddle by hooks through platinum hair.

The Witch’s hat is looped pitch-perfect over her hair with a length of reeds. Her neck ends in a cleanly cauterized stump, though as the head rocks he can make out the dent of blood where a pike was shoved through post-mortem.

Her gaunt mouth hangs open, eyes rolled to whitish-green. A wrinkled leaf stuck to her cheek falls off as she passes, crossing Oxton’s flame to join the others on the floor of the alcove.

The horseman leads his beast out of the roots hiding the exit and stomps up the hill to the edge of the fenced fields. Smoke sizzles off his coat into the sunset as he mounts up. He rides the horse out of sight past the pitch silhouettes of the oaks.

Oxton collapses back into her body. “You can take some air now,” she says, head still turned away from him to the orange window and its guard of roses. Some of the flowers are already dropping their faintly luminescent petals.

It takes strength not to gasp. His lungs feel like they have holes in them. Despite the danger, his body wants to find sleep again. He curls a hand behind his back and presses the bandaging: more sweetened sulfur releases into the air and his eyes water.

“How long have I been here?”

“You arrived last night. Landed right in the bog.” Oxton sidesteps back in to his makeshift cot, sitting down next to his legs. “I promise that moss smells better than sepsis.”

“Where’s the gauntlet?”

The green mist that replaced Oxton’s eyes flickers and dims.

“The weight of it was pulling your wound apart. An arrow, right? The head didn’t stay in, so I don’t know where it’s gone off to, but that’s a good thing really.” She folds her hands together in her lap, looking down at her striped knees. “I know the kind of mark it makes though. You ran into those two brothers?”

“You speak like you know what they’ve become,” Akande murmurs. He’s more interested than he sounds, but pain dulls his voice.

“I came in early to check the place. Found them when I went back to report. Genji chased me.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “Please, don’t tell me you hurt him again. Even if you didn’t have a choice…”

Akande gazes up at the cocoons of the hibernating sprites while he assesses his answer. One pair of wings rustles, dropping a handful of stars as the body inside glows briefly.

“They should have returned to Zenyatta by now.”

Oxton perks upright with fingers tight on her knees. Her hopeful smile comes so easily. Akande thumbs the chip in his lip. Blinking at him, she marshals the line of her mouth straight, tamps down her glow, and relaxes her feet, which’ve been drumming the soil since she sat down.

“You know while you were lying there, I thought about all the questions I want to ask you,” she mutters sternly. “But I’m guessing you had a brush with the Wilds and got pulled into this like everybody else. That about right?”

Akande nods, dragging both legs off the slope of the cot. It’s reassuring when his sandals find earth. He crooks a couple engraved fingers on his right hand at the sunset behind Oxton.

“Is that the way out?”

“Yeah, but I can’t recommend it.”

“The horseman seemed fine.”

“Of course _he’s_ fine!” Oxton snorts, sinking her jaw into her hands bitterly. She glances at Akande, then frowns at the blankness on his face. “I guess you might not have met him. Ships in the night and all that,” she allows. “He’s the Witch’s Servant. He goes out there every night looking for her body. I’m doing the same thing.”

“I thought you couldn’t leave.” He stands up. His blood rolls unevenly down his body at first, but the nausea fades as he moves past Oxton towards the glowing promise of freedom.

“Yeah! Go through then! See if I care!” Oxton snaps at his back. When his feet near the shimmering portal, he hears her flash out of her seat and patter up behind him. He looks down and her blue hand has tried to seize his wrist, but her fingers and palm stick through him. There’s a cold tingle in his veins as she pulls back.

He smiles down at her.

“I believe you. But the Witch’s body is out there. How are you going to reach it?”

Oxton rolls her fingers to her palms a couple times till the blue color is richer, more opaque. She smiles, her eyes on the doorway rather than him.

“I’ve got a girl on the inside.”

Akande peers down at his wooden arm, exposed in the sunset. He is unused to seeing it by daylight. He admires the grain of the wood, painted so it’s closer, but not exact, to the color of his skin. Then it’s painted a second time with cream stripes and panels, forming striking, interconnected patterns. There are at least nine eyes among them—and he has an urge to find Zenyatta, to commiserate, though these eyes taper as human eyes should and gaze in fixed directions. And there are figures to invoke the work’s various artists, all the strength they poured in to replace what was taken from him.

The lacquer that protects the paint and the spirits is still holding, though he supposes that someday only the flowing, riverine engravings throughout the wood may remain.

“What’s your plan once you have the body?” he asks Oxton as he brushes at the blue reflection of her flame on his body.

“She must be able to get us out of the worst of this curse even if she can’t break it. Leaving the Wilds always seemed easy enough for her. But she’ll need all her bits for it.”

“Isn’t it her curse?”

Oxton rubs her wrist, then taps one of the roses around the window. The petals bend under her fingers. She sighs relief and palms the fanged blue mouth of the jack-‘o’-lantern on her chest like she’s taking an oath.

“No, though I can’t figure out why it’s affecting other people. It’s supposed to be just me and him.”

“The horseman is part of it?”

“It was foolish to think he wouldn’t come back.” She bites her lip, eyebrows glaring low. “Something happened to him when the Witch died though. He’s not letting anybody alive stay down here. He’ll attack you right away if he sees you, alright? It’s already happened…”

“What about you?”

Oxton crosses her arms around herself, fingers prickling across the iron frames on her shoulders.

“Great of you to ask, but so long as I don’t get in the way of the hunt, he doesn’t mind that I’m here.”

Akande looks to where Oxton’s fire lights the mud of the grotto floor. He reads the deep scars of the horseman’s riding boots, moisture already collecting in the heels and toe-points.

“You said he attacked someone.”

“Yeah. Poor guy. Was coming down the same part of the cliff as you. Might’ve been my fault—wasn’t really thinking and I ran right up to him. When he…fled from me, he slammed straight into the mess.” Oxton frowns down at the same shadowy prints. “He looked so scared.”

“You didn’t help him escape.”

“He went somewhere I can’t go. I hope he’s alright.”

At her words he finally takes his eyes from the hearth of the exit. He looks back down the tunnel at the grotto’s mouth. He smells wax and pumpkins, but the ravine is pitch black outside.

“Can you show me where you saw the victim last?”

“Sure, I guess. I just gotta meet with Emily first.” Oxton’s whole body glows brighter. “She’s the one who called out to me, showed me how to reach this place.”

“Is she a witch too? What sort of magic does she use?”

Oxton grins.

“The very first kind of magic there ever was.”

_“Le…na…!”_ The doorway ripples. Oxton shakes out her hands at her hips and jogs in place.

“Now I just gotta have patience. Gotta time it right.” She’s talking to herself as another _Lena_ floats through the door. She smiles, baring her teeth at the corner of her mouth. “Wait till you can see her.”

Down the honeyed road appears a little cart pulled by an appaloosa. Inset panels painted with vines and flowers flash as the cart turns and stops at the edge of the grass. The cart is empty save for a couple pumpkins. The cloaked driver steps off the coach seat and rests one hand in the appaloosa’s scruffy white-tipped mane, cupping the other hand to her mouth.

_“Lena!”_ She pulls her hood down and her hair flows out red as fire.

“Tell her to look for the Witch’s body in the moat,” Akande blurts out, realizing the moment. Oxton already had one foot off the ground and pinwheels her arms to reclaim her balance. Her entire face wrinkles in sourly.

“The moat? I mean, I guess we haven’t tried there.”

She doesn’t leave him room for an answer. She’s gone, a small blue flame writing a zig-zag up the hill to Emily’s side. Emily holds out her arms, her cloak parting, revealing her embroidered emerald dress beneath. The flame leaps the last few meters to her and becomes Lena. But even with a body, Lena is burning. As she kisses Emily, pieces of her hair, her wrapping arms, her curly shoes straining up on their toes detach and burn blue as they drift into the air.

Their voices are conversational and Akande cannot hear them. Lena’s burning body blocks the shapes they make with their lips. He tests his right hand through the window. Then he pulls back the candles he’s made of his fingers, so he can blow them out.

Roses fall off the doorframe, landing fat in the puddles on the floor. Akande steps back and scans the grotto for his gauntlet. There is no sign of it. He returns to the alcove, wrapping on his sanghati through a series of flinches, and retying the sash on his waist. He meals his hand around the empty pouch he used to carry the shuku shuku. For a moment he drops his left shoulder against the wall and leans on the crumbling dirt.

A blue flash announces Oxton’s return. The space in front of the window distorts, fills in like a tunnel to the bottom of the sea, then her body pops out and she’s completely whole, unharmed by her travel. She pats smoke off her clothes and jaunts over to him.

“I told Emily what you told me. She’ll look.” She thrusts her hands down the pockets of her trousers and rocks from heel to toe. “I gotta be careful sometimes, encouraging her. If she stays out too late poking around after work, she’ll run into Dracula or some other horrible beastie!”

She’s smiling up at him. At _him_. Her mood is entirely different from before. “And the Servant will be back at sunrise. So let’s make the most of the time we’ve got too, yeah?”

“I’ve been resting long enough. Lead the way.”


End file.
